Why Uber’s self-driving cars won’t last, according to an expert at MIT

It’s an astonishing development, just a few short years after the taxi-replacement company began to transform the way people get around cities. Even though the cars have their limitations, it’s easy to imagine a future of robotic Volvos ferrying us all around urban centers like in a scene from a sci-fi movie.

But Kent Larson, an architect and city planner who leads the Changing Places group for redesigning cities at the MIT Media Lab, says self-driving taxis are likely to be only a short blip in the history of transportation in cities.

The self-driving Ubers are significant, he told Business Insider in a recent interview, because they further cut down on the need to clog up cities with heavy, expensive, wasteful personal vehicles. But he believes they’re just a step on the way toward even more sensible shared-transportation options.

Most trips in the city, he said, involve individuals moving around their own neighborhoods far below the maximum speeds of cars.

“Why have a 4,000-pound automobile that seats five to move one person a short distance at low speed?” he said.

Self-driving shared vehicles, even if they cut down on the total number of cars a city needs, still require major parking and driving infrastructure. The more you can cut into that, Larson said, the more you can expand living, working, and communal spaces for a city’s residents.

Which isn’t to say self-driving cars don’t excite Larson. In his own lab, he works on a variety of self-driving vehicles. But they’re smaller and lightweight – not geared toward the specifications of a family on a long-distance road trip.

“It’s just like, you had the horse-and-buggy,” he said. “You got rid of the horse – it still looked like a buggy.” But those buggy-like cars did not last long, even though they almost certainly seemed futuristic at the time.

An important note: Larson wasn’t talking about the company Uber when he said this. Who knows what role it will play down the line. But Uber’s self-driving car fleet as it looks today? If you accept his vision, don’t expect your grandkids to ever see it.